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4 Tools for Pinterest Analytics and Monitoring

I have to assume that by now you know what Pinterest is. If you don't, I have only one question for you: How long have you been living under that giant rock? Because Pinterest is one of the fastest growing sites and trends on the web, with people going crazy over it.

Where once the major addiction was Twitter and Facebook, now there are users constantly pinning images to their Pinterest board and sharing pictures with friends.

Pinterest has been announced as the #1 traffic referral for many image-friendly sites. While being an effective buzz marketing tool, it's yet that effectively tracked. Feel free to skip ahead to a tool of your interest.

More than for just subscribing to blogs and site updates, Google Reader can also be used to monitor your reputation and social media progress. All you have to do is import Pinterest "source" page for your site into it and start accumulating data.

Since Pinterest doesn't have a traditional feed system, it may be not that easy to subscribe to it. But you can create an RSS for any website, Pinterest included, through Feed43. It is free and doesn't require a registration. Here's a detailed instruction on how to feed your Pinterest "source" page using Feed RSS.

Then let it gather in Google Reader to check over whenever you need to. This will give you a good way to track what is being pinned from your site and when:

Use Google Reader's search option to filter your site pins by keywords.

Use Google Reader's "Trends" option to track when is the highest "pin-friendly" time for your site.

This program doesn't just cover single site analytics. It monitors all of your business and social media profiles for data, and puts them all in one place for real-time reports. They have a very basic version for free that has five widgets and unlimited dashboards. From there, you get more features, such as users, real-time sharing and custom branding for $9, $29 and $49 per month.

The free option is a good way to go if you want to try it out and see if you like it before committing to spending any money. It is one of the few dashboards that have been created with Pinterest as a monitoring option, but it has a number of others like Pingdom, Constant Contact, SalesForce, Add This and dozens of others.

This dashboard is specifically designed for Pinterest. It allows you to follow and unfollow pinners, schedule pins on your own board, find popular pins and get stats on what is being pinned right now, or involving you and your brand.

Conclusion

Pinterest is becoming an ever more important part of social media marketing. If you have thought of using it, these tools will allow you to monitor your progress and get real data to help you along the way.

It's been a few months since this article was published, but since then WhichSocial have launched, another handy analytics tool specifically aimed at retailers. It gives you details about which of your products are trending, which pins are being converted into sales and lets you benchmark your performance against your competitors. Have a look!